'the road of war' and 'the path of peace': William Morris's Representation of Violence

This paper takes as its starting point J.S. Mill’s comment on war, described as “an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things”, as well as Freud’s theory of war neuroses in his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), and uses both these concepts to advance a new reading of William Morris’s literary writings focusing on violence, one which sees it as not “the road of war” but “the path of peace”. Morris’s early romances (“Svend and His Brethren”; “Golden Wings”), not to say of A Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere, and the high fantasies (The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles) develop their own detailed blueprint of wars and battles which reveal to be a broad philosophical meditation on the entire mediaeval vision of man’s aggressive attitude. As part of this overview of the tradition Morris devotes close attention to mediaeval emblems of war (armours; shields; swords), displaying considerable ambivalence towards them. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues – chivalric values, warriors and fair women of old time, narrative representation of war in utopian writing, etc – which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re-read such writings as primitive forms of medievalism in a Freudian perspective. I will reflect on the conflict between the life instinct – Eros – and the death instinct – Thanatos –, and interpret the violence shown by Morrisean proper men of war as “an outpouring of innate aggressiveness”, one which introduces man’s failure of restraining his instinctual motives, reminding us that the principal task of civilization is to “defend us against nature”. Through the regression to a primitive level of personality, I suggest, Morris attempts to arouse a sense of rejection, in order to progress to the dream of order which News from Nowhere extols, with important political solutions which permit to live safely in an organizational manner with others.